CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — At a recent global summit at Harvard Medical School, held on May 14-15, one Armenian presentation raised a question that remains under-addressed in much of the humanitarian and mental health field: what comes after survival?
The presentation, delivered by Armenian Spiritual Revival Foundation (SRF) Executive Director Dr. Hovhannes Nikoghosyan, introduced an Armenian psycho-spiritual approach to collective trauma — one designed not for moments of acute crisis, but for the more difficult stage that follows, when people have survived yet still struggle to imagine how to live again.
Among those attending the session were SRF Founder Dr. Noubar Afeyan, Anna Afeyan, trustee and co-chair of the Afeyan Foundation, Lord Ara Darzi, co-founder of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, and Dr. David H. Rosmarin, president of American Psychological Association Division 36.
This is the problem the SRF (revival.am) has spent the last few years trying to address. Many mental health and psychosocial support programs are built to reduce distress, stabilize people and help them endure war, displacement and other forms of mass adversity. That work is indispensable. But survival is not the same as revival. Once the immediate danger has passed, many people are left with a more existential challenge: not simply how to cope, but how to recover coherence, agency, belonging and a future worth moving toward. SRF’s psycho-spiritual approach was developed for precisely that post-survival layer of recovery.
The group’s first central idea is that Armenians have been doing this, in one form or another, for generations. Through the Armenian Genocide, the 2020 Artsakh war and the 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, survival stories have continued to be retold around family tables, in churches and in classrooms. But these stories are not preserved simply to keep the wound alive. They are also retold to preserve what was achieved within and after the wound: endurance, rebuilding, continuation and early stages of revival. This is where SRF locates the Armenian DNA of the method. The foundation’s work has been to translate that deeply-rooted generational practice into a teachable, replicable and scalable psycho-spiritual model, relevant not only in Armenia, but also beyond.
That is why one of the defining concepts of the approach is “chosen revival.” In trauma studies, much attention has been given to how communities organize identity around pain, injustice and unresolved loss. SRF’s work takes another viewpoint. “Chosen revival” does not deny trauma or minimize catastrophe. It asks what happens when collective memory is used not only to remember suffering, but to retrieve examples of courage, rebuilding and forward movement, to lean on in the present. In the Armenian case, memory becomes not only a repository of pain but also a resource for action.
